Clarity Shot #8

This week I’ve prepared a ristretto… short & punchy, strong brew and no sugar (just the way I like it, each morning).

It’s inspired by & Juliet, the amazing musical I saw in London, last week - on my own quest to schedule joy (worth having a look, if you skipped it 😉)

It’s a reshuffle of the classic R+J story… with a twist: Juliet doesn’t kill herself when she wakes up and sees Romeo dead. She rebels and runs away to Paris with her best friends defying the established norms that would put her into a covent for life (where widows and disobeying youngsters usually ended up, in those times).

I won’t tell you the rest of the story, but here’s a trailer that will get you in the mood. It’s basically an amazing show about empowerment and rewriting personal narratives - and it inspired me to reflect on what needs to happen so we can write a different story for ourselves and live happier. 

So this week’s Clarity Shot brings a simple question:

What old stories you need to rebel against (or let go), in order to claim your better future?

Mine is about thinking I need to be perfect at what I’m doing (work, parenting, coaching, planning vacations, etc) and work hard to deliver outstanding projects…

It’s a tough process to rewrite this old narrative, with edits after edits and messy-ness all around. 

Tough, but worth it.

Even on dark days, I take comfort knowing it’s me who’s rewriting it (not the outer world’s expectations of me)… and that makes it worthwhile.
(with Billy Idol’s Rebel Yell screaming in my headphones, for a mood-enhancing effect)

You see, often we run our lives according to scripts and stories that the world set up to tell us how we ‘should’ live our lives… and often we come to a point where we realize that these stories no longer fit our dreams, goals, or the person that we’ve become.

They don’t set us up for happiness… and often we don’t see that it’s not us running the show, but an old narrative.

One that says we need to have the ‘right’ career, marry the ‘right’ person, make the ‘right’ number of kids, look and behave the ‘right’ way… and if we forget to align these cultural norms to what we really want & feel, we come up empty. Unhappy. Wasting time & life trying to fit into a role or a character that might not fit us.

However, we can always stop.
Observe.
See the story we need to let go, or rebel against.

We can take our power back and edit that story: adjust, rewrite, add a different chapter and lead it to a happier ending.

So this week, take some time and observe: what do you need to let go of, or rebel against, so you can rewrite a more satisfying story for your future?